The present invention relates to a system for protecting a group of locations of a network essentially consisting of forecasting a future act of vandalism at a location and intervening there prior to the vandalism occurring. The invention more particularly applies to the protection of networks, whose locations are accessible to the public, e.g. public telephone boxes or booths or automatic banknote dispensers.
The maintenance of such locations is a considerable burden on the network operator, because such locations are frequently damaged, either by pure vandalism, or, e.g. in the case of coin-operated public phone booths or pay-phones booths, with the aim of obtaining the money therein. Moreover, in the case of toll systems where the user pays for the use of a location, damage to such a location leads to a loss of income for the network operator.
The network operator generally wishes to rapidly restor a location which has been damamged to the operating state. Thus, it has been found that if a damaged location is left for several days, it can lead to the damaging or vandalism of other locations. Conversely, where damaged locations are rapidly restored to the operating state, a better service can be provided to users and it also contributes to giving the network operator a good image. Finally, it is obvious that rapid repair of damaged locations is of particular importance in the case of toll networks.
Numerous systems for monitoring the locations of a network have already been proposed, particularly in the case of public phone booths. For example, an apparatus analysing public telephone traffic is described in French Pat. No. 2 420 258. This apparatus comprises means for storing a lower limit and an upper limit of the traffic intensity of a telephone booth, said limit being fixed on the basis of observations of the traffic of said booth over a predetermined period, as well as means for comparing the real traffic intensity of the booth with the stored traffic limits. This apparatus in particular makes it possible to establish whether a telephone booth is faulty, because then its traffic is zero.
Public phone booth monitoring systems are also known, which comprise providing a certain number of sensors on the main phone booth members, such as the coin receiving means, the hand set and the actual booth, as well as alarm means making it possible to transmit an alarm on the line when the signal supplied by the sensor changes state. Such systems are more particularly described in French Pat. Nos. 2 395 557 and 2 499 737.
The known monitoring systems permit a passive monitoring of the network locations. They inform the network operator maintenance service that a booth has been damaged, which permits a rapid intervention for the purpose of repairing said booth. Although such monitoring systems are effective for maintaining the network locations in an operating state, they suffer from the disadvantage of not preventing or at least limiting damage to the network locations. Thus, very considerable costs are involved in restoring to an operating condition damaged or vandalized locations.
The object of the invention is to limit damage to the locations of a network accessible to the public. The invention is based on the finding that the attacked locations are not chosen completely at random and that instead the trajectory, path or route followed by a vandal successively attacking several locations can be at least partly dictated by criterion such as the nature of the location, e.g. public pay-phone booths, or the topography of the network, e.g. locations located on the same city street.
This finding makes it possible to envisage the forecasting of the trajectory of a person attacking the locations of a network. This forecast consists of extrapolating the trajectory of the vandal on the basis of the sequence of vandalized locations, which is possible as soon as the trajectory is outlined, i.e. as soon as at least two sites have been vandalized.
In conjunction with the police anticipating the trajectory of a vandal makes it possible to arrest him. This constitutes a first protection provided by the invention. In the long term, a supplementary protection is provided by the dissuasion effect on potential vandals as soon as the effectiveness of the protection system according to the invention is known and its effectiveness has been recognised.